I want to start this show by taking us back to the summer.

When the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were trying to pass the so-called

one big, beautiful bill, a tax and spending law.

The tech industry and its allies in Washington were lobbying hard to have

something called AI preemption added to it, basically an amendment saying that states couldn't

make their own rules about AI because states have been very active on that front. Every single state

has at least proposals, bills related to AI.

Garrett DeVink covers tech for the Washington Post.

More than half of the states have actually passed some kind of law related to AI just in the last couple years.

And this runs the gamut. This is, you know, child protection. It's deep fakes. It's all sorts of different things.

And big tech, which obviously works across all 50 states, objected to this regulatory patchwork, saying it was hard to comply with so many different sets of rules.

And so there was an attempt, a legislative attempt led by, you know,

Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, to put this preemption into the big beautiful bill this past summer

that would essentially say, you know, all those state laws, they no longer apply and the states can

no longer pass new laws related to AI because this is such an important topic. It needs to be regulated

federally. So that was what they tried to do in the summer and it did not work.

The amendment got pulled, but the issue hasn't gone away. Over the past few weeks, a group of

lawmakers tried to put an AI preemption provision

in the annual defense bill, and the White House has been circulating a draft executive order

that would do something similar. But there is a very important catch, one that Garrett's been

reporting on. It is not at all clear that this is something voters want.

And politicians are listening.

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